The Month in Review: September 2021 Feature Releases

Derek Nichols

Just like that, September is now behind us and school is in full swing. It’s also the first Tuesday of the month which means it is time to take one final look back at everything we added to the Education management products for September 2021.September was the back-to-school month for most schools, so naturally a hectic time for educators and families. As such, we totally understand if you had your attention elsewhere. Since it’s the start of a new month, what better time than now to look back and recap everything that changed with the Blackbaud Education Management products for September.

As expected, there’s plenty of content to get to, so let’s not waste any more time and jump right in, shall we?

Academics
Another busy month is in the books for the Academics teams. One of the bigger additions this month was Student preview of assignments, great for projecting or screen sharing assignments. What’s great is that this preview version contains no personally-identifiable student information. From assignment list view, use the context menu for an assignment and select See student preview. From this view, the assignment name, assigned and due dates, description, downloads and links, mastery skills (if applicable), and associated LTI tool name (if applicable) are fully shown.

We’ve also made some updates to the report card and transcript builders. The Report card setup and Transcripts setup pages are now full-width, meaning that the columns will expand to the width of your internet browser window. The + Build a new report card and + Build a new transcript buttons have also been moved down beside the Filter and other menu options.
In addition:

• When faculty uses See student preview to view an assignment with a rubric, they can use See rubric to view the rubric for the assignment.
• When editing an infraction for a student, a user must enter a whole number of Infraction points. If you enter a non-whole number and attempt to Save, this error message will display at the top of the window: "Infraction points must be a whole number.”
• The Classes list can now be customized to include Course and Section columns.
• When using Edit student enrollment, a student’s name will appear at the top of the window in the format “Find a section for <student name>.”
• Educators can add discussions from their Gradebook. When a teacher selects Add, they will need to select Discussion from the drop down to add a discussion.
• Faculty can once again see the performance summary for total points assignments from their Gradebook.
• Faculty can now more easily manage cumulative grade columns and highlight grades below a specific grade in the Gradebook. Faculty can select Grade columns from the Gradebook toolbar to show and hide summary columns and highlight cumulative grades below a threshold of their choosing.
• Faculty can once again use keyboard shortcuts in their Gradebooks. Faculty can see the available keyboard shortcuts under See key in the Gradebook.
• When a faculty member creates a discussion, the section labeled Statement/Question is now referred to as a Discussion prompt.
• Award managers can enter and edit awards for a single student or multiple students via the Manage awards page.
• Faculty can now see a full version of the rubric for rubric assignments from the Gradebook.
• Grade reports and transcripts can display students’ records from multiple school levels, such as undergraduate and graduate.
• Faculty can now see at a glance whether students have replied to a discussion from the discussion details page. In the student list on the left side of the page, faculty will see a green or yellow indicator for students that have posted, as well as a number. The number represents the total number of posts by the student, and the color represents whether the student’s first post was on-time (green) or late (yellow).

Core
Profile notices were a big focus for the Core team this week. Essentially, when sensitive situations occur, like divorce, a contact card manager at your school can now add a notice to the student’s profile. To create the notice, open the user profile in Core and use the option on the Contact card. The full message appears on the Contact card and an alert appears in the summary heading at the top of the profile. Additionally, you can create and view notices when you use a User list. A notice also appears in the summary tiles on Rosters. To view the full message, select the ellipsis (…) and then View profile notices.

To prepare for this change, ensure users have security group rights and roles to access the Education Area and that they log in with Blackbaud ID. For details, review this article.

Also released this month:

• We've updated the View Communications section to display the email address the communication was viewed from as well as the date and time it was viewed.
• When under View Communications, users can now see the full details of the notification that was sent. Selecting the subject of the notification will cause a slide out window to appear with the full message.
• We've added an infinite scroll to the View Handle Profile section. This enables the user to simply continue scrolling down to load more records instead of selecting different pages to load more records.
• By default, the values for the Race field now appear in alphabetical order throughout the application.
• Schools can add individuals to a shared household address even when they don’t have relationships with everyone else. If they have a relationship with at least one member of the household, they can share the address.

Enrollment management
This month for EMS, the team improved the Not Returning block for responsible signers. The messaging has been updated, displaying as the Yes or No question: "Will you be coming to our school next year?" Selecting No in this case automatically checks off the not returning box.
Also this month:

• When administrators withdraw a student who never attended and assign them the past candidate role, enrollment rolls are now removed. In addition, school form reminders are no longer sent when a student withdraws.
• Student checklist managers now have access to a past student filter on student checklist lists.

Extracurricular
We have changed the Community group owner role to Community group leader. The role will remain the same, it will just have a new name.

Billing management
For September, BBBM enabled billing clerks to review the total Amount qualified and the total Amount granted for the selected school year. This is found under Financial aid on billing profiles.

In addition:

• The total unawarded aid amount for the school year is now visible under Financial aid on the billing profile.
• When determining which transactions to mark as posted, Billing clerks can now filter to include payments with specific deposit numbers.

Tuition Management
For Tuition management, you can now schedule the Failed Payments Report to be emailed daily.

If you want the full and complete details of everything we’ve added to the Education management products in September, make sure to visit our What’s New letter. Use the Recent option at the top of the page to view past and archived releases. Want to stay updated whenever we have a new release? Get notified via email by signing up for our mailing list here.

That’s going to do it for the release recap for the month of September. We’ve got plenty of new content. See you then!